Have you been craving a better understanding of formulas and functions? Have you reached out to me for help and asked for tutorials too? Well, ask and you will receive! The new Friday Functions Video Series is for serious PowerAppers like myself that want to become ninjas at using functions and formulas!

Recently I volunteered to create a calendar app that we could use to share events across our organization, especially in the areas of Diversity and Inclusion. The target goal was to enable us to broadly share relevant events, but to allow consumers of the app to select ‘which’ events they would like added to their calendars. This was a really fun project that I was able to finish on a plane flight from DC to Seattle. Learn how I expedited this app with a little bit of planning...

Data Validation within apps and business forms is critical to prevent errors, and to ensure data transactions occur without errors and uncomfortable bottlenecks during submission. In this blog I will be sharing my personal best practices for data validation in the PowerApps that I design. I hope these will help you to enhance your organization's PowerApps too.

This new app sample was inspired by someone who posted a Forum Idea regarding PowerApp Themes. We really enjoy reading all the forum ideas, and I refer to those who post ideas as our enthusiastic “innovators”. This particular innovator came up with the idea that we should expose our “Themes” (see screen shot below) to the consumer of the app (aka the person running the app), and not only to the designer (or app maker). What an awesome idea! It really shows that they appreciate Empathic Design. Empathic Design is a process that one of my past managers (Karuana Gatimu) has instilled in me. It is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product. As I thought about this further, I realized that this could also be even more relevant in mobile app design because factors around mobility can affect the way we format the screen; low light, screen glare, etc. depending on where the person is when they are running the app. It also could apply to accessibility, especially for people like me who always wants to make the font size bigger! So, will all those good reasons in mind, I decided to see if I could create my own configurable theme, using the features and formulas that are already in PowerApps today. I love what I ended up with, and I hope you will too! (Please let me know if you expand upon this idea for your own PowerApps in the comment area below.)

Last week Carlos gave us an excellent example of a tabbed format within a tablet format PowerApp. Check it out here:: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/design-tips-part-1-handling-tab-control-scenarios-in-powerapps-for-full-screen-formats/. This is another example of a tabbed format for mobile phones. The design is by Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi who is ingenious when it comes to PowerApps patterns. I've enjoyed using this format as well because it's quick, easy to configure, and data driven.

Best Practices for PowerApp Icons Are you considering the design of your app icons when publishing new PowerApps in your organization? Based on industry standards, app icons can be more important than meets the eye! Let’s take a few moments this week and think about the importance of app icons.

PowerApps makes it very easy to design forms that include graphics; both images and graphs. This blog shows how to combine three fun tactics into one gallery control: 1. Pick up images from the SharePoint List Picture Column HyperLink (images are stored in my OneDrive for Business Folder named "CategoryIcons") 2. Create my own Bar Graphic based on List Data 3. Filter the Data Using Images in the Group Legend

It is easy to create apps that are beautiful, as well as easy to use, when you leverage PowerApps formulas alongside media components which can act as custom controls. In this blog, we'll learn how to create a single page app that requires no typing at all to submit humidity and temperature data to a SharePoint list. This part of the app build will take around 20 minutes to complete.

You are cordially invited to a special PowerApps design and creativity challenge! Create your own single screen app, and have fun using creative thinking to make it interesting and easy to use. Two participants will be gifted a special "PowerApps Design Master" t-shirt, as well as some fun PowerApps swag. Additionally, one person will be invited to join me in a community virtual meet-up. The challenge starts today and ends on February 15, 2017!